At the end of his set,
the audience gets a glimpse of Ty Segall’s ape
self. Throughout the night, one of the security
beefcakes at The Hoxton in Toronto has been getting
progressively more aggressive about giving stage
divers the heave-ho. Ty is not very pleased with
this. So, during the last 30 seconds of closer
“Wave Goodbye”, the 25-year-old garage-rock
shredder—who is not a beefcake—decides to have a
go at him.

After the muscle head shoves a leather-jacket-clad
goofball back into the crowd, Ty shoves the
bouncer, who loses his balance, but flips around
in time to bring the singer down with him. All
three tumble into a mass of sweaty, pogo-ing
kids. As outros go, it’s definitely a step up from
the usual “we’ve got some CDs in the back”
routine.

Segall’s guitarist, Charlie Moothart, and John
Dwyer, frontman for headliners Thee Oh Sees, rush
over to help him out and, for a second, it looks
like things might get violent. (On YouTube, there’s
a startling video of Dwyer ending a 2004 Toronto
show by smashing a guitar hard over a promoter’s
head—tonight's bouncer probably hasn't seen it,
though.) Luckily, the bar staff quickly appears
with a tray full of complimentary shots and
beers. All is forgiven.

Later, while we sit in Segall's tour ride—a
scuffed-up but soccer-mom-friendly Toyota Land
Cruiser with a U-Haul trailer hitched to the back
bumper—he explains that even with all the moshing,
diving, and pushing, tonight’s show wasn’t even
his most physically abusive Toronto gig. Last time
he played in town, somebody pushed the microphone
into his face and knocked out his tooth. “We
finished the set,” he says.

Not every Ty Segall gig ends
with a bruise or a trip to the dentist’s
office, but they do seem pretty strenuous,
especially when stacked up one after another. One
night earlier, in Buffalo, Segall is looking
faded. The singer and his band mates—Moothart,
bassist Mikal Cronin, and drummer Emily Rose
Epstein—are two weeks into a three-week trek,
their fourth tour of the year, not counting
one-offs and long weekends. The time to go crazy
backstage has come and gone. Instead, Epstein is
leading Segall through some pre-show
stretches. There’s a whiff of marijuana in the
air, but it seems to have drifted over from down
the hall, where Thee Oh Sees are
quartered. Everybody seems a little worn out.

Watching Segall on stage, where he shouts and
hollers with enough intensity to put nodules on his
vocal chords, the fatigue is
understandable. “We’re not a folk band or a dance
band,” he says. “We’re a fucking loud, gnarly,
screaming, emotional band. And it’s rad, but you
gotta be in that zone every night.” Segall’s
public persona, in so much as he presents one, is
ebullient and surfer-ish—he’s “stoked,” things are
generally “rad,” and his band “shreds.” This
relaxed-fit demeanor can be tough to maintain,
especially on the nights when the sound guy is an
existentially bummed-out gearhead. Or when the
best and cheapest place to crash is a friend’s
underwater ashtray of a sofa. Or when a guy with a
robot skull mounted on the dashboard of his pickup
truck decides he wants to clobber your
guitarist. Each of these nuisances arise at least
once during the three tour stops—in Buffalo,
Toronto, and Detroit—that I spend traveling with
Segall and his band. And that’s just three
days. The road is a good place to get a sense of
Segall, though, because other than a few breaks,
that’s where he's spent his adult life.

“So, what’s this story going to be about?” asks
Segall, partly out of curiosity, partly just to
make friendly conversation. “I’m just a normal
guy, trying to work things out through song.” If
there’s one thing Ty Segall can’t abide, it’s
TMI. And recently, given the increased attention
from an expanding fan base, saying less has become
a more time consuming task.

“The thing about rock'n'roll these days is that
there’s a lot of fucking demystified greatness,”
he explains while munching down a handful of fries
slathered in mayo at a Toronto takeout
counter. “You gotta have someone to believe in
that will not tell you anything—somebody that will
not give you a single piece of information, but
who looks rad and makes rad music. I mean, I would
do anything to be a 12-year-old kid when Kiss’
Alive came out.”

He never wanted a Facebook page, but his fans went
ahead and started one for him anyhow. He had to
replace it with an official page—so that he could
officially post no information to it. On Twitter,
an overzealous admirer squatted his handle and
started writing crude, misogynistic, and very
un-Ty messages. The bona-fide Ty Segall Twitter
page that replaced it displays one post: “This is
the real Ty Segall Twitter page.”

His music mostly does the job for him,
though. Segall has released a full-length album
every year since 2008, but this year he caught a
wave of inspiration and made three: Hair, a
harshed flower-power homage with Los Angeles
weirdo-pop auteur White Fence; Slaughterhouse, a
straight-to-tape 80s scuzz punk-meets acid-rock
rave up recorded with his live band; Twins, a
headphones-friendly, lose-your-mind concept
record. All of them are good.

At 25, Segall is old enough to remember the last
gasp of grunge, but he bonded harder with the
sound of classic rock; dressed in a denim jacket,
black jeans, and with a crudely drawn eyeball
tattooed on the back of his left hand, he could
have plopped out of a yellowing issue of
Crawdaddy. Grabbing dinner at a nearby pizza
parlor before the Buffalo show, we chit chat about
rock trivia. Segall’s favorite Black Flag singer
is Keith Morris, but he was psyched when he met
Henry Rollins, too. The Grateful Dead were
awesome, but only until Pig Pen left the band in
'72—after that, they just weren’t weird enough
anymore. For a long time, he couldn’t stomach the
sound of rock music that was recorded during the
80s and 90s, with its digital reverb and
ultra-dense guitar, so he’s only just now coming
around to alternative-era staples like My Bloody
Valentine and Mudhoney.

He skipped 90s irony, too. When it comes to music
built from distortion and volume and ruined vocal
chords, he is a true and pure believer. “There are
all these kids who are growing up on Skrillex and
all this digital music,” he says, considering how
out-of-place his fuzz and grime probably sound to
a generation reared amongst laptop noodlers. “What
are those kids gonna think when they hear
rock'n'roll?”

In his reckless youth,
which was all of three years ago, Segall was a
thrasher. He wrote two-minute burners that started
quick, ended quicker, and sent audiences
scampering up the walls and into the
rafters. Recently, he’s become more comfortable
weaving his melodic gifts into the din, using his
eerie, Lennon-esque falsetto to fortify his
hooks. And on his last few records, Segall has
developed an uncanny ability to slide into the
skin of his old-school heroes—cribbing choice tics
from the likes of Neil Young, Black Sabbath, or
the Groundhogs, and then weirding them up with his
own coat of wobbly sonic ectoplasm. It’s the sound
of yesterday remade to suit today’s
signal-to-noise standards.

“His music doesn’t have the corny qualities of
somebody capturing something from the past, but it
has those signifiers, inspirations, and impulses,”
says Rian Murphy of Drag City, which has released
Segall's last two solo albums, arguing against
those who would tag Ty’s schtick as pure
nostalgia. “It’s as if something had been
[digested and] shit out and, within that shit, was
something retro.” His songs are too thrashy to
register as 60s homage, too bubble-gummy to be
mistaken for 70s stoner rock, and too sludgy to
pass for hardcore punk. Still, in every Ty Segall
song, one can detect a few frayed threads borrowed
from each of these genres.

“Rock'n'roll doesn’t tell you what to think and
do, it makes you feel a certain way, so you do
those things on your own,” says Segall. And he
knows the hit-you-in-the-face factor is key to
making you do those things. Twins, which Segall
performed and recorded almost entirely on his own,
definitely meets the standard for skronky
catharsis.

Another factor zooming Segall into the
here-and-now is his prodigious streak, which has
been an unintentional but fortuitous adaptation to
the era of social media, where music arrives and
vanishes from the cultural consciousness in the
space of mere days, if not hours. It's tough to
forget him, because he always has a release on
deck: an album, a 7”, or maybe he’s just playing
drums and singing backup vocals on his friend's
record. Suddenly, without realizing it, the last
three LPs you bought have Ty Segall's name on the
cover, or somewhere in the liners. Though, for
better or worse, 2012 may mark a golden age for
Segall's workaholic bent. “Never again,” he says,
laughing, when asked if he’s got another three
records in the bag for next year.

PJ’s Lager House is a
bar, restaurant, and venue in Detroit, but
it’s also one of the worst record stores in the
history of record stores. Follow a series of
cardboard signs down to the unfinished basement
and you’ll find a couple of boxes filled with
mold-crusted mellow-jazz LPs. There are no clerks
to mind the stock, but it doesn’t matter, because
there’s nothing worth stealing.

The green room is next door to the “store.”
Tonight, sci-fi garage rockers Timmy’s Organism
are opening the show, and Timmy—looking very
glam-rock-zombie in a tattered orange shirt,
jeans, and filthy head band—is reminiscing about
the time he tried to fart at a hotel security
guard, but wound up (let's say) overcompensating.

Timmy’s all right, though. He may be a grown man
who pooped his pants in the hard fluorescent light
of a Best Western hallway, but at least he has a
sense of humor about it. His guest, a local barfly
who is looking very zombie-contemporary in a navy
sweatshirt and a pair of stonewashed jeans, is a
creep. He mostly carries on and on about
transsexual hookers—taking them to bars, getting
them thrown out of bars, buying them hamburgers,
etc. “The 49ers suck,” he blurts to a room full of
San Franciscans, in an attempt to start a
conversation. “Yeah, they do,” says Dwyer,
shutting him down. “I don’t give a fuck about
sports, but we’ve got the best tranny hookers in
the country.”

This guy’s attitude is too dark for Segall, who
excuses himself to the merch table. It’s not that
he can’t handle weirdos, he loves weirdos. It’s
only the ugly, desperate, and unproductive ones
that bring him down. And for every charming Timmy
you hang with on tour, there’s also a decidedly
less charming character who may or may not be
wearing stonewashed jeans.

If Twins has a unifying concept, it’s split
personalities and the friction between competing
identities. Segall says that he often worries
about losing his mind, referencing a history of
mental health issues in his family. But right now,
his main internal schism seems to involve being a
relative norm in a music community full of wackos,
be they lovable or otherwise.

When he’s performing, Segall can tear it up with
the best of them, but his rock-destructive
impulses seem to let up once he sets down his
guitar. Gazing at a pot-leaf emblazoned gig
poster, Segall reveals that he’s never really been
interested in drugs. According to Eric Bauer, his
long-time recording engineer, the schizophrenic
meltdown section of “Scissor People”, from
Hair—where the band leaps through four different
feels in the space of 30 seconds—was driven not by
schedule one substances, but energy drinks. “He’s
a big sugar head,” says Bauer. “He’s a kid when it
comes to candy. He gets a little excited.”

Many of Segall’s musical compatriots have drifted
far enough askew of the straight world’s routines
that they can’t really just call it a day, buy a
new set of clothes, and head to law school, but
Segall doesn’t come off quite so out-there. He is
a weirdo, he's just not that kind of weirdo. His
personality doesn’t click with the cliches that
surround his genre. Talk to Segall for 10 minutes
and you can tell he’s not a hedonist, or a manic
depressive, or a mystical glambo space alien. He’s
just an earnest kid from the ‘burbs with a heavy
set of emotions, who has made it his business to
travel the world, throwing down heavy rock riffs,
regardless of what havoc it wreaks on his family’s
SUV. At times, he seems a little defensive about
this.

“There’s endless ways of having a double
personality,” he says. “You can be a showman and a
family man—a wild and crazy person on stage, and
then go hang out with your daughter or something.”
He’s right, but in the bizzaro world of
rock'n'roll, where listeners often rely on an
artist's problems and suffering to define and add
narrative weight to their art, just being a
regular guy with a dog and a sonic destroyer
requires some mental agility in itself.

Segall grew up in Laguna Beach,
California, the adopted son of a lawyer
(his father) and an artist (his mother). According
to guitarist Moothart, who also grew up in the
area, it was a swell place to live. At least, it
was until the television crews showed up. In the
mid-00s, some kids from Segall’s high school were
cast for an MTV reality series, "Laguna Beach: The
Real Orange County", which would later spin off
into "The Hills". The subsequent media attention
buffed out the town’s old-school hippie-haven
vibe. “Everybody wanted drama," says Moothart.

Not that teenage Ty was Mr. Laid Back. “I was a
really unstable person emotionally, I wasn’t the
best communicator,” he recalls. “I was a very
existential 18-year-old drinker—the guy that would
skip class and buy a 40.”

When he attended the University of San Francisco,
where he graduated with a degree in media studies,
it was partly to please his parents, but also to
force himself to fly solo. “I wanted to live far
enough away that I couldn’t rely on my parents,”
says Segall. “I didn’t want to be able to have a
freak-out and just be able to go home for the
weekend.” Segall may have been a gloomy kid, but
he wasn’t anti-social. He played in a lot of
bands, first as the drummer in an ESG-style
dance-punk group and then singing and playing
guitar in the Epsilons, a spazzy
mod-rock-meets-Devo ensemble that released two
albums before breaking up when Segall was 19. In
college, he formed the no-frills garage-punk trio
Traditional Fools and then, after booking a show
that his band mates couldn’t make it to, he
started playing solo as a one-man-band, using a
kick drum and a guitar.

For eight months following college, Segall kept a
part-time job helping to build marijuana grow
boxes, but after that, it was pretty much all
rock'n'roll all the time.

There are two categories of
great rock'n'roll performers: visceral and
mysterious. Visceral musicians let it all hang
out—their performances are cathartic, unwieldy,
and intensely personal. Bob Seger is a visceral
guy; when Eddie Vedder climbs the balcony during
“Even Flow”, he is displaying his visceral
tendencies. Mysterious musicians refuse access to
their inner lives. They shield their work from
direct interpretation, shy away from on-stage
histrionics, and swap out identities as quickly as
some people change outfits. Bob Dylan is
mysterious. Some artists, like the Rolling Stones,
have managed to play both roles simultaneously.

I ask Ty about some of the musicians that we’ve
discussed on tour—singers and songwriters whose
work he reveres or can at least bro down on when
their videos are called up on YouTube—and where
they fall along this hypothetical continuum.

Neil Young?

“Both.”

David Bowie?

“Bowie was both.”

Iggy Pop?

“Iggy Pop is visceral, but the Stooges are fucking mysterious.”

Meatloaf?

He pauses a moment to consider the hefty, operatic
rocker’s body of song. “Meatloaf is pretty
visceral,” he decides. But for the most part,
Segall insists that the heavy hitters in his
record collection reside squarely between these
poles, especially T. Rex's Marc Bolan. “He’s a
blend, a chameleon,” explains Segall. “He knows
the power of not screaming in your face, but he
also knows the power of screaming in your face,
too.” Not screaming in your face is fairly new to
Segall. The title track of 2011's Goodbye Bread,
his first Drag City release, was a breakthrough on
this front—a mellow power-pop ballad that, for the
first time, found Segall favoring vulnerability
over velocity. The lyrics are opaque, but
unpretentious, with Segall delivering "Sesame
Street"-style couplets like “Hello red, goodbye
blue, hello me, and goodbye to you,” that dial in
a surreal, sun-drenched sense of SoCal
sentimentality.

Segall is still visceral, but he’s making rapid
progress on his mysterious side. Though he once
created music designed to make people freak out,
dance, and pogo at concerts, his recent output has
become noticeably more cerebral. Each of the
records Segall has released this year occupies its
own strange parallel universe; he was a punk rock
realist, but now, he’s more of an escapist,
shifting through musical identities and writing
albums that are their own unique biospheres of
guitar fuzz, black light, and mystique. “When I
was a kid, I’d listen to Bowie and go, ‘I’m on a
different world,’” recalls Segall. “That’s what I
wanted. That’s what I still want.”